Nicole Mammarella: Popular vote: Flawed argument

Nicole Mammarella

Friday

Apr 25, 2008 at 12:01 AMApr 25, 2008 at 3:36 PM

Following the morass of the 2000 presidential election, there has been talk of doing away with the electoral college. In lieu of amending the U.S. Constitution, individual states are now being asked to assign their electoral votes to the candidate that wins the national popular vote, and not the candidate preferred by that state’s voters.

Following the morass of the 2000 presidential election, there has been talk of doing away with the electoral college. In lieu of amending the U.S. Constitution, individual states are now being asked to assign their electoral votes to the candidate that wins the national popular vote, and not the candidate preferred by that state’s voters.

Setting aside the question of whether an end-run around the Constitution as a political expedient sets good precedent, the supporters of this proposition are overlooking the advantages of the electoral college system and inflating the benefits to be gained by moving to a direct election.

The first flawed plank in the national popular vote movement’s arguments is revealed every time they use the word “democracy” to describe our form of government.

The United States of America is a federal republic and merely uses democracy as a method in its governance.

The electoral college, by fostering a consensus candidate mentality, is simply one mechanism of curbing the “tyranny of the majority” and avoiding the dangers of a pure democracy.

James Madison elaborated on this point throughout the Federalist Papers, insisting that “It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.”

In a national popular vote system, candidates do not have to appeal to a broad spectrum of voters throughout the entire country and can instead rely on building a majority from a particular interest group.

Think back on the oppression of minorities of every kind; the majority does not have a monopoly on justice and is itself often created by inflaming prejudices and appealing to the peoples’ worst inclinations.

Supporters of the national popular vote also seem to lose sight of the issue of state sovereignty, which would be further eroded by this system.

The Founding Fathers’ worry about an overly powerful central government led them to set the power of the states in opposition to the federal power, preventing a monopoly of political power by any single entity.

The importance of maintaining a federal form of government as a buffer between the central power and the people is sadly illustrated by the history of any of the various “people’s republics.”

Our founders carefully considered more than 2,000 years of political history in designing our method of governance; tinkering with one of the basic tenets of their plan will have far-reaching consequences and should never be undertaken lightly.

Another argument from proponents of the national popular vote is that heavily red or blue states receive little attention from the candidates; and if there were no electoral college, the candidates would have incentive to campaign everywhere.

Abolishing the electoral college would change the candidates’ campaign strategy, but not to the extent imagined.

Under the current system, candidates are best advised to campaign in “battleground” states.

If state boundaries become irrelevant, the strategy of efficiently reaching large numbers of undecided voters will remain, but the new campaign grounds will be cities; the bigger the better. Switching one bias for another is hardly a justification for altering our Constitution and dependably partisan areas such as Massachusetts won’t be getting much attention under either system.

Finally, proponents of the popular vote point out that the electoral college grants smaller states more power and makes individual voters unequal.

However, if their concern is true parity in representation, why is there not a call to alter the structure of the United States Senate?

A few times in our history the president has not been the winner of the popular vote. But every single year of our nation’s existence, the smaller states have been accorded power entirely out of proportion to their population by dint of having two senators per state in the U.S. Congress.

Of course, this system exists because of the sovereignty of the states and is a manifestation of the federal nature of our government; but if parity in voter power is the actual root cause of the current outcry for a popular vote, it would be far more logical, and do more to advance true parity, to alter the nature of our Senate.

Attacking only the electoral college in the wake of a close election suggests that sour grapes are a greater motivator than the quest for a more direct democracy.

Nicole Mammarella, an occasional contributor, is a graduate student in genetics at Harvard Medical School and has been actively involved in constitutional issues. She lives in Quincy.

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